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Topic: One Skip Ahead (Read 1813 times)

Winter in Amdarh was a cold and blustery thing. The difference from Dhemlan’s warmer coastal towns was significant and it was not one that Adara was terribly pleased to become more familiar with. Not even what the witch would have considered her heaviest winter clothing had done much more than mute the bite of the wet and cold wind that cut through the city.

She sighed, tucking her hair behind her ear. It was just another thing to invest in. How agonizingly inconvenient.

The foul mood had followed the Green Jeweled witch all day. It had been successfully hidden for hours behind a benevolent smile and a voice that was some kind of muted cheerfulness. It wasn’t quite the chipper approach that other shop-keeps had employed but for the taller woman, it seemed to work. Now that the shop had been closed though, the till attended to and the doors locked tight, she let the smile slip from her features. Fatigue played in the corner of her eyes and the press of her lips but for the most part, the witch seemed undaunted by the long shift that she had partaken in.

Home, however, would be a trickier prospect to reach. The paths in from to the shops were laced with ice - a familiar prospect for most in Amdarh, she supposed - and that had evoked the belief that she was in her own form of personal Hell. How unfortunate. Nearly catching herself from falling (again) Adara choked back the expletives that might have soothed her wounded dignity.

She paused a moment, tucked against the front of what sounded to be a restaurant. Silverware clinked and the murmur of voices rolled out into the night as the door banged open with someone entering the establishment. On chance, Adara glanced up: the stone was comfortingly solid at her back, although that seemed to be the only practical component of the building she was leaning against. Despite the weather, curtains hadn’t been pulled over the windows to preserve the interior temperature. She could see through the panes to the tables and clientele within. It was a predictable scene, beautiful females and their attentive escorts - the psychic scents leaked out as effortlessly as the sounds.

High Society. It made her lip curl in derision. Shoving herself back to her feet, as if incapable of resting in their proximity for even a moment longer, Adara returned to trudging through the light snowfall that dusted the ground.

Others ventured along the paths as, while the sun had set, the evening had truly only just hit its stride. She sighed. Soon, Adara consoled herself. Soon. Soon it would be spring and the Queens would offer their gifts to the land and the days would be long and bright and warm and the land would be green and thriving again. It would happen soo - splash!

The witch scowled at the slush that had been kicked up by a passing carriage, landing on her clock before sliding onto her foot. Hell. Not soon enough.

The bitterness only fed into her temper. Ill will towards the Aristo population of Amdarh gnawed at her bones as she trudged deeper into the cold night. So lost in her thoughts as she was, Adara nearly missed the shouts. As they drew nearer, however, the witch’s senses keyed in. Anger laced a Warlord’s psychic scent. Light Jeweled. Distress echoed in the same vicinity, although it was fast moving down the path in her direction.

“You little thief! Come back here!”

The child, of course, appeared to have no inclination of obedience. The small Warlord bolted past her and ducked into an ally further down the street. Watching him corner (he was impressively nimble, even despite the icy footing), Adara’s mood shifted into something quieter. More subtle. A flash of Craft, in quick succession, went unremarked. It was a tiny thing, on par with a personal warming spell - nothing of interest.

Although if someone had watched more closely, they would have seen the feet of the adult man lose his traction on the ground. Hidden under the snow, a sheer layer of ice had formed and the male landed heavily on his ass. From a length away, Adara appraised him coolly.

Under the scrutiny, he scrambled to his feet and nearly seemed set to continue his chase.

“Those who can’t protect their belongings surely don’t deserve keep them, hm?” In this case, the adult had been thoroughly rousted by a child - and he, along with the handful of people on the street, seemed to know it. An uneasy titter of laughter accompanied the general return to personal business along the path. Adara, for her part, stood and watched him leave. His finely coated back turned down another street at last, nearly a block down.

The damnable sun had finally sunk low enough to cast Amdarh in shadow. So many of the building in the lower parts of town were close enough together that the shadows had bound them all together by mid-afternoon. Once the sun hit the rooftops, it wasn't long before the shadows stretched across streets and made twilight come a little earlier than it would have in a less dense area. This all suited Niall just fine, however.

His trip to the Living Realms was not all for fun; there was business he was supposed to attend to. Exactly how the High Lord had come to the conclusion that he was the best one to send was still a mystery to him, but sent he was, and off he went.

The Gate at Ebon Askavi had taken him to Kaeleer, and from there he'd made his way out of Askavi, Kaeleer and on to Dhemlan. It hadn't been that quickly, of course; he was impeded by the fact that he could only travel under cover of darkness and that the Living Realms took their toll on demons in ways that Hell did not. Personally, he thought that it was because Kaeleer and Terreille were further from the Abyss that the demons had a harder time there.

Aside from the feeling of a heavy blanket having been lifted from him, there was some sort of background hum that had disappeared when he'd come to Kaeleer. After so many years in Hell, it felt jarring.

On the other hand, there was an endless supply of fresh blood, and Niall felt no real compunctions in taking what he needed. The demon was discreet, of course. Nothing in the immediate area of the Gate, or the direction he had actually headed. It seemed like common sense that one kept one's hunting grounds off of one's own doorstep. The occasional missing vagrant wouldn't set off any alarms, so long as there weren't too many all in the same place. Thus, the Prince had made his way to Dhemlan, and to Amdarh, closer to alive than he had been in twenty millennia.

The High Lord had given him instructions before he'd left, and had made Niall take some very serious vows of secrecy. They had been full of loopholes, but Niall hadn't planned on telling anyone in Hell about any of his plans, anyway; not to mention, if the High Lord was leaving loopholes in anything, Niall was immediately suspicious. Even after untold years working with the Warlord Prince, it was difficult to tell when he did something just to throw Niall off his guard or when it was merely an oversight. With the Black backing the High Lord, it didn't truly matter.

Because he was planning on being in the Living Realm for more than a handful of weeks, he was on the lookout for a place to settle in. A home base. Some place to set up shop, so to speak.

Despite his preferences to the contrary, he was looking for something unobtrusive and plain, something that could be easily overlooked and forgotten. There were a few places that had been appealing, a little ways off the main streets, in unassuming parts of town, all currently abandoned. He had just found another one that seemed appealing and was exploring the area surrounding it a little more fully, still hiding in the shadows between buildings and watching what sorts of people made their way by.

Shouts drew his attention and made him draw back slightly into the shadows. A boy running by the alley he was in drew him out again almost immediately. He leaned a shoulder against the building to watch as the man following the boy and shouting at him also went barreling past, only to slip and fall on what had not been an icy patch moments before.

A corner of the Prince's mouth twitched as the man scrambled back to his feet, only to be met with laughter and stalked off.

"An idiot he may be," Niall mused aloud, "but an idiot she is not. That was a neat little trick." He wasn't certain that the flicker of Craft had been hers, or that it had frozen over the place where the man had fallen... but that was too many coincidences all in one little place.

To say that Adara bristled in quick riposte was something of an understatement: the tall witch's demeanor was decidedly prickly as her attention settled on the owner of the lightly cultured voice, whose words indicated a perceptiveness beyond what anyone else had managed. A muscle tic'd in her jaw as her eyes caught the slender, well dressed male: there was more to be said than that, but for the moment, all Adara could do was assess him with sharp acuity.

What could she get away with? Already, the charming smile had settled on her expression, the sort of look that seemed cheerfully guileless. Simple, almost. It was the expression she wore through the hours of work, the way that she could keep her disdain from trickling through the interactions that kept her in decent enough finances to care for her family.

This, however. This, Adara thought, was different. He had already delegated ownership of the spell she had used, had accurately deduced what had occurred.

Her lips thinned as her features shifted into something sharper, something keener. "Bet you have all sorts of little tricks," the witch retorted, shoulders settling comfortably into the stone at her back. The fact that she hadn't noticed the male earlier.. that, alone, made her uneasy. His clothing was undeniably well made. In another place, she might have concluded he was like the bulk of her clientele: vapid, self absorbed, and unobservant. The fact that she hadn't noticed him though..

The young woman's expression changed, and Niall could all but see a mask sliding into place. His own expression remained amused, on the edge of a smile, not quite a sneer. The Prince pushed away from the wall, standing straight again.

He gave a low laugh, and said, "Wouldn't you like to know."

The Prince cocked his head to the side, took in the young woman's looks, shrugged, and started to turn away. It had been an amusing moment, nothing more, forgotten in another day. He was more or less sated on blood; there wasn't any reason for him to go murdering people in the streets or alleys.

It hadn't been hard to blend in to Dhemlan, aside from the fact that he looked like one of short-lived races. He had been, a very long time ago, but in terms of who was going to live longer - if what demons did could even be called that - he had already outlasted nearly twenty generations of long-lived folk, and would likely outlive another twenty before he got bored enough to disappear forever.

Clothing styles had changed, but it had been nothing at all to manage to get some newer ones that were still up to his standards. His hair he had just pulled back from its usual mess, and it fit well enough into current fashions not to be entirely out of place. All in all, he was set to find what the High Lord had sent him to find. And yet.

He turned back to the young woman before he'd even really fully turned away and looked at her appraisingly.

"You, girl, you live in this area?" he asked, eyes narrowing slightly.

Pompous, irritating, elitist little - hidden behind her psychic shields, Adara cut herself off. Not only was it unproductive, she thought with a gimlet stare at the male, but there was something just disconcerting enough about him that her instincts were screaming at her. While she wouldn't heed them so thoroughly (turn? leave? Give the illusion of running? Never.) she would at least, curb her reactions to something more tangibly barbed.

"Yes, actually," the witch intoned, no small measure of derision in her voice. "Who the hell wouldn't? Anyone who says otherwise is liar or a fool." Or both.

And while Adara wasn't ready to concede that she was either an idiot or a fool, evidence at least suggested an imprudent amount of impudence to the witch. Or, perhaps it would have been impudence if she were ten years younger, more inclined to laugh or smile playfully. On her, it was a sharp-edged honestly that she was used to using to pointed effect. It as an achingly sweet relief to be released from the pleasant smiles that she delivered day in and day out.

Her sharpness seemed prepared to go unremarked on. Adara's eyes narrowed as the male shifted. His posture was as dismissive as his look and his shrug. She had hissed quietly in ill temper, although when the witch's instincts jabbed at her again, had willingly fallen silent. Leaning against the wall, Adara had been prepared to watch the older male leave when it appeared that he had changed his mind.

It was an abrupt enough shift that she was.. leery. Lifting her chin slightly, she continued to study him through the narrow-eyed gaze that was rife with skepticism, thick with suspicion. "What's the right answer to that, Lord? Moreover: what's it to you?"